Operator glossary
Category targeting
A Sponsored Products manual targeting type that bids on an entire category node rather than one keyword or ASIN, with optional brand, price, star-rating and Prime refinements narrowing which products inside it your ad chases.
You pick a category node and Amazon makes your ad eligible against the products inside it. Amazon's targeting help puts a category target on “all search results and detail pages that are relevant,” so treat it as a browse-and-search play, not a detail-page-only one. In the Ads API it is a ProductCategoryTarget: for Sponsored Products the refinement object takes productCategoryId, productBrandId, price and rating greater/less than, and Prime shipping eligibility, plus an age range (toys and games only) and a genre (Books and eBooks only). Sponsored Brands keeps category, brand, price and rating and drops the rest; Amazon DSP takes the category id alone; Sponsored Display runs both a contextual category target and an audience variant keyed on category views or purchases in a lookback window. It bills CPC.
The refinement panel sells precision the reporting layer only half delivers: brand, price band and rating collapse into one targeting row and one ACoS, so you never learn which refinement worked. The ASIN view survives — for product-attribute-targeted ad groups the search term report puts the detail-page ASIN in the customer search term column — but only terms with at least one click appear, so it is a sample, not a census. Sizing the pool up front is harder: Amazon's count endpoint returns asinCounts as a min–max range. And the integer-only 0–5 rating rule belongs to that sizing request, not the target, which takes decimals. Run category-alone, category plus price and category plus brand as separate targets, then graduate the ASINs the report surfaces into product targets.
The numbers
- A Sponsored Products ProductCategoryTarget refines on category id, brand, price and rating greater/less than, and Prime eligibility, plus age range (toys and games) and genre (Books and eBooks); Sponsored Brands supports only category, brand, price and rating, and Amazon DSP the category id alone.
- The v3 targetable-ASIN-count endpoint (POST /sp/targets/products/count) restricts ratingRange to integers 0–5 and returns asinCounts as a {min, max} range, while the target refinement itself accepts decimals, as in Amazon's productRatingLessThan 4.5 example.
- Amazon's search term report documentation says alphanumeric entries in the customer search term column correspond to ASINs and the detail page where the ad displayed, for automatic and product-attribute-targeted ad groups, and that the report includes only terms producing at least one click.
Primary sources: Amazon Ads API - The target entity (ProductCategoryTarget refinements by ad product) · Amazon Ads API - Creating product and category targeting expressions · Amazon Ads API - Sponsored Products campaign management (getTargetableASINCounts, RatingRange, TargetableAsinCounts)